Dual platform: Children are power users

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Dual platform: Children are power users
by Dennis Sellers, dsellers@maccentral.com
May 23, 2000, 7:00 am ET

Bacil D. Warren, CAN, network systems technician, Catalina Foothills School District: "The bottom line is COST. PCs are simply more expensive if Macs are bought right.

"Schools have to look at TCO (total cost of ownership). The typical PC in business lasts 2-3 years due to the Microsoft upgrades and whatnot. Children are shown to be power users and use far more applications, etc., in education than the average business user. So, in labs and classrooms, the hardware gets a more severe pounding than at an office. Does your school want to get itself on a 2-3 year upgrade cycle? My kids' school went Wintel and their hardware is dying after three years, and they don't even use it hard. They bought Pentium 133s in early '97. By contrast, the local public school district bought Macs in the junior high lab in '93-94, which they just replaced with iMacs, thus having a seven-year life in the labs, double my kids' PCs from 97, and those Macs are now going to classrooms for more use.

"Wintel has two choices, NT and Novell. If you have any number of PCs, you will need an administrator and that means hiring a new staff position or training and exiting person. Neither is for the faint of heart. Training and certification is EXPENSIVE, costing literally thousands of dollars. And you will need it in a well-used system. So count that in the purchase price.

"Consider, too, that neither NT nor Novell have the network utilities that are present in AppleShare IP 6 and Apple Network Manager. Take the Internet. There is much concern over what sites our darlings visit while on the Web. In AppleShare, the administrator can look at four screens at a time and actually see what each kid is doing. Not on NT or Novell. An administrator can look at a computer in the other end of the building over Network Manager and help a teacher with a problem. Not on NT/Novell.

The point is that AppleShare was designed by Apple for educators knowing that schools don't have bundles of dollars to administer and keep systems running with trained administrators. AppleShare fits that bill. How is any Wintel solution going to erase the cost of an administrator at some $60,000-80,000 per year those folks get in the corporate world? Why would one want to work for less in education? That is what you face.

"Also, new Macs come with wireless networking installed. All you need to get is the Airport hubs ($299), each of which handles 10 or more clients wirelessly at 10 Base-T speed and an Airport card ($99) for each computer, and you can have a wireless net throughout the school within 150 feet of any Airport base, which also supports roaming across all the base stations. You could take an iBook and walk through the whole school and stay connected.

Dennis Maiman, MD, PhD, Medical College of Wisconsin: "At the Department of Neurosurgery at the Medical college of Wisconsin, we are clearly 'dual platform.' The majority of our systems are PCs with a couple of guys and most researchers on Macs. We use Novell for the network, and it is absolutely seamless. No problems at all. By the way, the Macs require much less technical support.

Richard Wolfert: "For 14 years I ran a Mac only computer lab in an elementary school (with the New York City Board of Education). With 17 machines being used six periods a day, I saw the worst of what students could do to a computer. The ONLY times I required support was to replace one power supply and several keys. The keys were broken primarily by stacked chairs falling on them. I NEVER needed software support. I won't say there weren't any problems, but any problems that arose could easily be taken care of by Norton Utilities and other packages without outside support. I was able to do all software/system repairs myself. Believe it or not, when a mouseball was stolen, I was required to have the vendor replace it. Contractual stipulation, even though I was more than capable of doing that and much more.

"Now, I take care of all 24 new Dell machines at my current school, and about 15 older computers (all Windows). The amount of software/system support is amazing. Last week, for example, we had two machines go down -- I mean freeze to the point where I could get no responses to system resources. I should point out that both machines utilize full protection in that students can only launch specific programs and NOT get into any control panels or system files. Our 'standard' computer expert couldn't get either machine to work. He wasn't able to get either to respond to a system start-up disk because neither would change the boot disk protocol. He told me he'd have to call in someone higher, probably to reformat the drive and reinstall all software.

"Amazing! My Macs could be booted from a CD and any severe problems could be handled from there. The PCs cannot! Usually I would have a sick Mac up and running in just a few minutes. Too bad these Windows machines aren't as easy to run or my students would not have to wait weeks for repairs.

"Several months ago I read a report that one reason that many computer managers won't switch to Macs is NOT software availability, but because three out of four of them would be out of work. So, it can be taken that Macs require only about 25 percent of the support needs of PCs. Enough said."

Kirk Enstrom, editor, Watertown TAB & Press: "I work for a large newspaper chain in the Northeast, and we use both Windows PCs and Macs. It would be impossible for us to get rid of the Macs, as they can handle tasks that the Windows machines are, frankly, not up for.

"Our reporters and editors use the Windows machines to write stories, do Web research and e-mail. The Macs are used for graphics, photos and page layout. Throughout the entire process, we must be able to exchange files between the platforms easily and without any hassle. In our office, the network is handled through a Novell server, which is known for its ease in handling both platforms.

"It should be noted that while we have a hefty IT staff, they are rarely called in for Mac-related problems. All computers at times experience difficulty, but when a problem crops up on the Mac, we can almost always solve it ourselves. When a Windows PC starts acting up, however, it is usually far too difficult to fix it without calling in the IT folks. It would probably be a better solution to eliminate the PCs, reducing the IT staff. This would, of course, mean a large capital purchase, so we'll continue to work with the current situation.

"A school system considering standardizing on Windows would not be making a very wise decision, in my opinion. Aside from the initial capital expense, they may very well need a larger support staff. Windows computers are well known to require upgrading far faster than Macs, further increasing costs. The learning curve is higher on Windows. In an educational environment, it would seem to make more sense to have a system in which the teacher and students can simply do their work on a computer, rather than having to rely on technicians to fix every little problem.

"The operating systems do work well together, and I cannot recall a single cross-platform issue in the nearly five years I've been working here."

Mark Souders, director of technology, Northmont City Schools: "In my opinion it costs twice as much to support PCs. I put a PC lab in two years ago. I will never do it again. The server pretty much required us to have a full-time person in the lab. I never had this problem when I had Macs. We had 11 AppleShare servers running flawlessly for seven years before we had one problem. They needed little attention. Thirty percent of the PCs had to have floppy drives replaced the first six months. We had printing problems out the wazoo! Windows 95 was so unreliable that we had to buy a site license of partition magic and drive image. I have placed twice as many PCs in offices as Macs during the last eight years at Northmont while the PC industry struggles to keep up in a GUI environment. On the average, PCs have been replaced every two years in offices and Macs every 3-4 years."

Marc Campbell, Northrop Grumman, Technology Development, High Performance Computing, Group Lead, Melbourne, FL: "The following are my views, not a corporate statement. Apple Computer provides a critical role to Science & Engineering disciplines. Apple Computer lead IBM and Motorola to the development of the power efficient Power PC.

"Did you know that if USA computer users switched from Pentiums to PowerPCs, the USA national energy consumption would be reduced by more than 1 billion US dollars? Apple Computer is a green (energy conscious) choice.

"Many of the most modern aerospace applications use Power PCs to solve high density, high throughput parallel computing problems such as surveillance signal processing. One example is Joint STARS.

"I have never seen a job applicant with Windows only experience who is qualified to work in embedded supercomputing. Apple computer helps provide the technological diversity required to support new science and engineering solutions."

Last month, we ran a request for help (http://www.maccentral.com/news/0004/12.educator.shtml) from John Eller of Hoover High School who is working to prevent the Des Moines School System from narrowing its school network down to a single platform -- Dell/Windows -- with Macs being phased out. Eller asked for reasons he could present to the board that showed the advantages of a dual platform approach. MacCentral readers sent him LOTS of information, which Eller kindly shared with us. But he says he doesn't need any more info. Still, we'll continue to present testimonials on the ease, advantages, and importance of keeping a dual platform network in schools (and similar organizations).

If you want to see our previous reports, they're at:

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